For instance, Unisys spokesman Martin Krempasky told Newsbytes, a system developed using Unisys' technology might be used to accept airline reservations over the telephone, or handle mortgage applications.

Applications will be able to translate ordinary English sentences, such as "I want to reserve two seats on the 2:50 flight from Chicago to Miami," into terms a computer can handle. For each application, Krempasky said, there will be a custom vocabulary of something more than 1,000 words. Speech-recognition technology will come from third parties, he said.

Unisys worked on the natural-language technology for about 15 years in its defense operations, and held on to it when it sold the rest of the defense operations to Loral Corp. in March of last year, Krempasky said. "Now we're trying to commercialize it." The company has already distributed close to 50 licenses to research institutions and universities for research and development purposes, and plans to make its Natural Language Understanding product generally available later this year.

The company first showed the technology off in a mortgage application system at a retail trade show last December.

Although combining Unisys' technology with speech recognition would make possible systems that understand limited telephone conversations, the same natural-language tools could be used without speech recognition to handle typed messages in conversational English over the Internet, company officials noted.

Unisys' home page on the World Wide Web at http://www.unisys.com .

(Grant Buckler/19960621/Press Contact: Martin Krempasky, Unisys, 215-986-4788, Internet e-mail martinrkrempasky@unn.unisys.com)